Scripting to automate your mindless Android games

There’s a silly little Android game making some noise on the Interwebs. It’s called Curiosity which is a 3D cube with something inside. The thing is, every single pixel on the cube must be clicked in order to get through a layer. There are of course multiple layers, and… well, you get the point. [Stephen] figures this is a perfect thing for a bit of scripting and set out to find a way to automatically play the Android game.

As you can see above he’s got a pretty good start. To use the script in its current form he finds a part of the cube that is mostly solid green. The Android device is plugged into a computer using the USB cable, and the Android Debug Bridge runs the script. It’s amazingly simple, as it uses the monkeyrunner package which comes with the SDK. The proof is there, and it’s just a matter of whether or not he wants to spend his time to fully automate the playing of the game. You can see a demo of the script embedded after the break.

That was like my adventures with sudoku. I’ve discovered the game, thought it was nice, played about two games, wrote sudoku solver in php, abandoned sudoku. If there is simple algorithm to solve some game, where is the challenge?

So you don’t play anything but maybe roleplaying games?
After all you can easily automate pretty much every game.
The challenge (of course not with this one, this one is just stupid) is to do it in your head.

I agree, good games are tough. I’d like some good strategy games, like Go or something.

I LOVE games like Call of Duty. But really, pay it once and that’s about it. I just don’t play them over and over.

Kinda like Doom or something. You get through it, OK, now what? Sure, you could play over and over trying to beat your own score and find absolutely everything, and then look for cookies or hidden stuff. But I’d rather do other stuff.

Two days ago I did something similar.
Wrote a small script in nodejs that reads bitmaps and “draws” them into Curiosity. Because I was using adb-events it was not nearly that fast as in the video but it worked out pretty well :)

Well I drew a couple of images with it and I guess nobody noticed ^^ But after taking a look at this MonkeyRunner-Scripts I will re-write my code to get a much better performance and draw larger images. Becuase handling this stuff with adb’s sendevent-command is really painfull

Back in the late 1980s I wrote some SALT scripts for Telix that could play a number of BBS games. I set it up to autodial all the local BBSs, max out the number of turns and then hang up. I managed to get the #1 ranking on the lesser-used boards in a few weeks, and just about all of them after a few months.

The game isn’t amazing but there are some fun things to learn along the way. Some areas holds much more gold than others and then there are ways to increase your harvesting by clearing the screen or getting multiplier bonuses. I think we’re also going to learn a lot more as the game progresses.

There are also tools and things that you can buy to do more damage at a time.

This type of thing can be a ton of fun with facebook games. I had a “word twist” bot that would destroy people in no time flat. I figure if I suck at the game, then use something I don’t suck at to my advantage.

Yes for a long time you used to be able to bet actual money on Yahoo Games, so I used AIM (a macro software) that would identify Scrabble words by matching the pixel colors on the screen in a very basic form of text recognition. Then it would use a GET call to a scrabble dictionary website to play the game for me.